Virginia

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VIRGINIA

In 1750 the Virginia colony had an estimated population of 230,000. Enslaved black people made up more than 40 percent of this number. Most of Virginia's white population growth had come from British immigration. In the colony's earliest days, as many as three of every four new colonists were indentured servants hoping to work their way into a better life.

John Rolfe's experiment with tobacco in 1612 had proven to be a defining moment in the economic history of Virginia. Thereafter, new settlers came to Virginia expecting to prosper by growing tobacco as a cash crop. Tobacco culture led to the establishment of large plantations worked by indentured servants and later by slaves. By the 1750s Virginia was exporting from 40 to 50 million pounds of tobacco a year and wealthy planters dominated Virginia politics.

The rich, untapped soil of Virginia at first produced abundant tobacco crops, but successive crops drained the soil of its fertility. By 1750 many of the prominent planters of Virginia had tapped out the soil of their Tidewater and Piedmont plantations and had started anew in the Shenandoah Valley. Less wealthy Virginians, along with German and Scots-Irish farmers from other colonies, had also begun to move into the valley. The poorest of the migrants moved further westward into the mountains on the frontier, where they bore the brunt of Native American hostility. Frontier settlers and their interests received little attention from political leaders in the east.

collision on the frontier

The native peoples of the Tidewater and Piedmont regions had long been decimated and dispersed by epidemics and generations of warfare. However, Shawnee and Leni-Lenape (Delaware) bands from beyond the mountains periodically raided white frontier settlements in western Virginia. Meanwhile, as good land grew scarcer, many colonists looked to the Ohio Valley as the next source of new farmland. A group of wealthy Virginians, including Governor Robert Dinwiddie, formed a land speculation company and obtained from King George II (r. 1727–1760) an extensive Ohio grant in territory claimed by both France and Britain.

Virginia's colonial government, safely ensconced in the east, had been unwilling to allocate money for building forts and defending the disputed western territory of the Ohio Valley. An increasingly menacing French presence, however, led Governor Dinwiddie, anxious for his land grant, to send the twenty-one-year-old militiaman George Washington to confront the French in Ohio country. Washington's mission of 1753 was the first of several unsuccessful forays. Essentially, Virginia was conducting a private war with the French in order to control western lands, which it claimed to the Pacific Ocean. However, the Virginians' defeat in 1754 at the hands of the French drew the British government's attention and ignited the French and Indian War (1754–1760).

In 1755 George Washington and several hundred Virginia troops joined General Edward Braddock and his British regulars on a mission to capture Fort Duquesne. On 9 July a French and Indian force ambushed the army, inflicting in just three hours the debacle known to history as Braddock's Defeat. The surviving British regulars departed, leaving the western frontier open to deadly raids. Virginia colonists, already resentful of British royal authority, grew to resent the British even more for having failed to protect them. Colonel Washington spent the next three years commanding a Virginia militia regiment charged with protecting the frontier. After the war the British government incurred Virginia's wrath with the Proclamation of 1763, which barred colonists from settling west of the Allegheny Mountains and ordered existing settlers there to return east. Virginia speculators and settlers alike faced ruin and blamed their plight on the authorities in distant London. Many defied the proclamation and continued to settle west of the line.

road to revolution

Virginians again chafed under British authority when Parliament sought to recoup its military expenditures by taxing the colonies. Members of Virginia's House of Burgesses emerged as leaders in the growing resistance. Frontier lawyer Patrick Henry spoke out against the Stamp Act (1765), making statements that many of his peers considered treasonous. However, a majority of the burgesses came to agree that resistance was necessary, and in May 1765 they adopted the Virginia Resolves, a set of statements asserting the exclusive right of colonial governments to make their own laws and tax their own citizens.

The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, but in the face of new forms of British taxation imposed by the Townshend Acts of 1767, the burgesses passed additional resolutions in 1769 objecting to British actions. Not for the last time, the royal governor dissolved the House of Burgesses, and the burgesses reconvened in a tavern. There they devised and enacted a plan to boycott British imports, which other colonies emulated.

In 1773 Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and other legislators established a Committee of Correspondence to communicate with the other colonies and organize opposition to British authority. When the House of Burgesses voted to aid Boston in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party (1773), Virginia's royal governor, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, disbanded the legislative body. Meeting in a tavern in the spring of 1774, the burgesses called for a congress of all the colonies. The resulting first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in September 1774. Among the Virginia delegates to the Congress were Patrick Henry, Peyton Randolph—who was elected president of the Congress—and George Washington.

Back in Virginia, Lord Dunmore briefly won public support by mounting an expedition to secure the frontier from Indian raids. In October 1774, Colonel Andrew Lewis defeated a force of Shawnees on the westernmost border of Virginia at the Ohio River. But support for Dunmore was short-lived. In March 1775 a Virginia convention met in Richmond to address the growing breach with Great Britain, placed the colony on a war footing, and voted to raise troops. The next month, Dunmore ordered the seizure of a store of gunpowder, and Patrick Henry led the militia to Williamsburg to confront the governor. Dunmore fled to a British warship. In May, a Virginia delegation went to the Second Continental Congress. There the delegates voted to raise a Continental Army, with George Washington as its commander in chief.

Dunmore ordered British regulars to occupy the town of Norfolk and raid coastal plantations. In November 1775 he offered freedom to slaves who would flee their owners and join a Loyalist regiment. The following month, British forces marched out from Norfolk and met a Patriot militia force at Great Bridge. This engagement, called the second battle of the Revolution, drove the Dunmore contingent from Norfolk. The royal governor and his men fled to British warships. Dunmore ordered the ships to fire on Norfolk, and the town was destroyed. This action turned most Virginians against Great Britain.

the commonwealth at war

On 15 May 1776 the convention, meeting in Williamsburg, declared Virginia an independent commonwealth. The convention also resolved to propose independence from Great Britain at the next session of the Continental Congress. Accordingly, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed independence in Philadelphia, and the Congress passed the motion on 2 July 1776. Thomas Jefferson played the leading role in drafting the Declaration of Independence.

In Virginia, Patrick Henry served as governor from 1776 to 1779 and again from 1784 to 1786. Thomas Jefferson served as governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781. The results of his efforts in the 1770s and 1780s to bring about significant changes in Virginia law bore fruit most notably with passage of the Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) and the abolition of entail (1776) and primogeniture (1785). He failed, however, to establish his proposed public education system. By 1776 the population of the newly declared commonwealth had increased to about half a million, maintaining the ratio of 60 whites to 40 blacks.

The British invasion of the Chesapeake Bay in 1779 spurred Virginians to move their capital from Williamsburg to Richmond. Frequent movements of troops across Virginia depleted supplies of food, tobacco, and livestock. As many as thirty thousand slaves left Virginia plantations, either voluntarily or by force, during the war. Yorktown, Virginia, saw the American Revolution's last major campaign in 1781.

After several years (starting in 1781) during which the thirteen states were loosely organized under the Articles of Confederation, James Madison and other leading Virginians pushed for a constitutional convention to establish an enduring central government. The resulting Constitution, however, contained clauses that many Virginians found objectionable. One such clause permitted the transatlantic slave trade to continue to 1808. Virginia had abolished the importation of slaves, in part to protect the economic value of Virginia's existing slave population, so the state's planters opposed that provision. After lengthy and heated debate, Virginia by a close margin became the tenth state to ratify the new United States Constitution on 26 June 1788.

virginia and the nation

Virginia was the largest and most populous state in the new nation, even though it had ceded its trans-Ohio territory to the national government in 1784. Virginia's territory included what became the state of West Virginia in 1863. The census of 1790 reported the total population of Virginia at about 692,000. This figure included about 306,000 blacks and the more than 55,000 individuals living in western Virginia. The west Virginian population included only about 2,000 blacks because the mountainous region could not support many large plantations. About 15,000 German immigrants had settled in western Virginia by 1790, and the Virginia government soon began publishing laws relating to the frontier in both German and English. In 1790 the ancestry of Virginia's white population was 68.5 percent English, 10.2 percent highland and lowland Scottish, 6.2 percent Scots-Irish, 5.5 percent Irish, and 6.3 percent German. There were also small numbers who were of French, Dutch, and Swedish ancestry.

Subsequent censuses reported Virginia's total population at about 808,000 in 1800 (of whom about 45 percent were blacks); 878,000 in 1810 (48 percent black); 938,000 in 1820 (49 percent black); and 1,044,000 in 1830 (nearly 50 percent black). Richmond remained the state capital while Norfolk became the largest city, with a population of about 7,000 and a thriving port. By 1830 the white population of the Piedmont and Tidewater was steadily declining. At the same time, Virginia's black population lived almost entirely east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the ratio of blacks to whites was in many counties more than 2 to 1.

Virginia's increasing black population caused enormous social turmoil. A law of 1782 made it easier for owners to free their slaves. To prevent owners from abandoning less valuable slaves, who might then become public charges, the law limited manumission to healthy and fit slaves of prime working age. Popular reaction to the resulting increase in the free black population caused legislators to amend the law in 1806. The act of 1806 declared that blacks freed after passage of the law who remained within the state for more than a year would forfeit their freedom and could then be taken and sold for the benefit of the poor. Effectively, the free black population thenceforth could only grow by natural increase. Still, some thirty thousand free blacks lived in Virginia in 1810, a tenfold increase over a thirty-year time span. Over the same period, the slave population increased by nearly 50 percent.

On 30 August 1800, Virginia's governor received word of a slave conspiracy, later called Gabriel's Rebellion. The plot involved some one thousand poorly armed slaves who planned to march on Richmond and capture the city, killing white people along the way. In the event, a violent storm and floods prevented the conspirators from assembling. The authorities called out the militia, made hundreds of arrests, and executed more than two dozen. Gabriel's Rebellion increased fears of slave insurrection and conspiracy. The Virginia legislature enacted laws restricting the activities of the free black population, although free blacks had not been party to the uprising. In addition, in 1801 Virginia legalized the practice of transportation, the selling of slaves convicted of crimes to distant markets. Thereafter, Virginia largely relied upon the threat of transportation to deter disorderly behavior. Virginia also grew fearful that outsiders—namely northern abolitionists—would assist slaves in suing for freedom or escaping. A series of statutes addressed this concern. For example, an act of 1805 defined any assistance to escapees as slave stealing and imposed harsh penalties. Over the ensuing decades, Virginia strengthened its runaway slave laws and campaigned for a stronger federal fugitive slave law.

Four of the first five U.S. presidents were Virginians: George Washington, the first president, from 1789 to 1797; Thomas Jefferson, the third president, from 1801 to 1809; James Madison, the fourth president, from 1809 to 1817; and James Monroe, the fifth president, from 1817 to 1825. Jefferson and Madison formed a political party, the Democratic Republicans (often called simply Republicans, it was actually the forerunner to the modern Democratic Party) in opposition to the ruling Federalists. During the nation's formative years, the early presidents divided along party lines, with Washington favoring the Federalists and a stronger central government and Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe supporting the Democratic Republicans and greater state authority.

Bipartisan conflict over state and federal authority boiled over when Congress under the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. These laws provided for the monitoring of foreign nationals, the deportation of foreigners deemed to be dangerous, and the suppression of written or spoken dissent. The Federalists promoted these laws primarily to squash political opposition, while Democratic Republicans saw them as a threat to civil liberties.

Southern Republican leaders sought to oppose this show of federal power with an assertion of state authority. Jefferson, while serving as vice president of the United States, anonymously drafted a set of resolutions calling the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional and urging the states to annul such laws. The Kentucky legislature passed a modified version of Jefferson's draft in 1798 and 1799. Virginia's Democratic Republicans introduced a similar but milder set of resolutions, drafted by James Madison, and the state legislature approved them in 1798. Fearing federal reprisal, Virginia also authorized a military buildup. Indeed, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions carried an implied threat of secession from the Union. The resolutions set a precedent for the southern states to defend the institution of slavery by asserting states' rights.

In 1801 the Virginian John Marshall became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; he served for more than thirty years. Marshall established judicial review, the right of the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress (Marbury v. Madison, 1803). He also established the right of the Court to review and overrule decisions of state courts, including the supreme court of his home state. For example, in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816), the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a Virginia supreme court decision that had allowed the confiscation of a Loyalist's property.

Beginning in 1800, Virginia's Democrat Republican leaders in Richmond established a statewide party organization. The party leaders came to be called the Richmond Junto because of their political effectiveness. The junto supported many successful candidates for seats in the state legislature and the U.S. Congress. The group also invariably persuaded Virginia voters to back the Democratic Republican candidate for president. However, Virginia's influence on national affairs began to decline with the election in 1825 of a non-Virginian to the U.S. presidency.

During the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Virginia's economy stagnated as tobacco prices languished. Planters, however, continued to control the state government, and they resisted change, including the construction of internal improvements that was sought by westerners. Capital that might have been used in businesses other than raising staple crops remained tied up in land and slaves. Additionally, the failure of Jefferson's plan for public education denied the poor an important avenue for economic advancement. Virginia's population began to fall in relation to the rest of the nation as thousands of citizens left to pursue opportunity elsewhere. By 1830 a series of economic depressions had left Virginia with only one reliably profitable export commodity—slaves—and with an underclass of struggling, poverty-stricken farm laborers.

bibliography

Billings, Warren M., John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate. Colonial Virginia: A History. White Plains, N.Y.: KTO, 1986.

Hardwick, Kevin R., and Warren R. Hofstra, eds. Virginia Reconsidered: New Histories of the Old Dominion. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

McColley, Robert. Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. Virginia: A Bicentennial History. New York: Norton, 1977.

Schwarz, Philip J. Slave Laws in Virginia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Sharp, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.

Sutton, Robert P. Revolution to Secession: Constitution Making in the Old Dominion. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989.

Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. New York: Viking, 2001.

Roberta Wiener

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation